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over the failure of his mission, and spends a lot of time mumbling under his breath, trying to find a way to salvage it.

“If you don’t mind my asking,” Him says, “what was your mission anyway?”

Fisheye tl~inks this one over for a while. ‘Well it depends on how you look at it. Nominally, my objective is to get a fifteen-year-old girl back from these assholes. So my tactic was to take a bunch of their bigwigs hostage, then arrange a trade.”

“Who’s this fifteen-year-old girl?”

Fisheye shrugs. “You know her. It’s Y.T.”

“Is that really your whole objective?”

“The important thing is, Hiro, that you have to understand the Mafia way. And the Mafia way is that we pursue larger goals under the guise of personal relationships. So, for example, when you were a pizza guy you didn’t deliver pizzas fast because you made more money that way, or because it was some kind of a fucking policy. You did it because you were carrying out a personal covenant between Uncle Enzo and every customer. This is how we avoid the trap of self-perpetuating ideology. Ideology is a virus. So getting this chick back is more than just getting a chick back. It’s the concrete manifestation of an abstract policy goal. And we like concrete-right, Vie?”

Vic allows himself a judicious sneer and a deep grinding laugh.

“What’s the abstract policy goal in this case?” Hiro says.

“Not my department,” Fisheye says. “But I think Uncle Enzo is real pissed at L. Bob Rife.”

___________ Hiro is messing around in Flatland. He is doing this partly to conserie the computer’s batteries; rendering a three-dimensional office takes a lot of processors working fujitime, while a simple two-dimensional desktop display requires minimal power.

But his real reason for being in Flatland is that Hiro Protagonist, last of the freelance hackers, is hacking. And when hackers are hacking, they don’t mess around with the superficial world of Metaverses and avatars. They descend below this surface layer and into the netherworid of code and tangled nam.shubs that supports it, where everything that you see in the Metaverse, no

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